The potential to wear
moving-image artworks on your wrist is now a reality. Inspired by the concepts
of wearable art and screens, artist-curator Aram Bartholl has merged the
two—with the help of 12 top contemporary artists, including Ai Weiwei and Oliver Laric—in “Full
Screen,” a new exhibition at xpo gallery in Paris. A moving-image artist in his own
right, Bartholl creates work that explores the intersection of technology,
media, and everyday life, exploring questions like “How do digital innovations influence our everyday actions?”

This
latest venture, where he’s assumed the role of curator, comes to fruition
through moving-image works from
leading international artists, which are meant to play on Samsung Galaxy Gear
smartwatches. Recognizing that the screen—a constant in moving-image art from
Nam June Paik’s stacks of TV sets to Ken Okiishi’s gesture/data paintings
on flatscreens—will ultimately become obsolete, Bartholl sought to celebrate
its recent developments, creating a vibrant interplay of scale and resolution
between the high-tech watches, which hang from strings on one of the gallery’s
walls, and a low-resolution, 10-meter-long LED screen, which plays all of the
works on loop nearby. With each watch comes a miniature visual gem to discover,
running the gamut of web-based media and digital animations. We offer a few
highlights below.

Drawn to Ai Weiwei’s active
online presence and Twitter account, Bartholl invited the dissident artist to
participate, recognizing that “there are few really famous artists who really use the
Internet.” His wearable work plays
the YouTube music video he created about his 2011 detention by the Chinese
government, including music and lyrics.

Laric’s piece, a revolving
rendering of a classical sculpture, comes from his 2012 Lincoln 3D Scans
project, for which he created digital scans of sculptures from the the
Collection Museum in Lincoln, England, and published the data online.

Initially garnering
attention for her two-minute webcam videos in which she puts on a signature
SoCal persona, Cortright has been named a descendant of “the moving-image work of Alex
Bag and Pipilotti Rist.” In buggin out, she repeatedly puts on and takes
off a pair of sunglasses, each time revealing that her eyes have grown larger.

Twenty-something artist
Vincent Broquaire creates hand-drawn animations that excel through simple,
refined imagery. In Minute after minute, the screen gradually fills up
like sand flowing into an hourglass, playing with perceptions of figure and
ground, negative and positive space.